Bare Bones

Today I spent a morning as mornings should be . The last week has seen me scraping the barrel of my positivity as the work in Bristol chose to come down prematurely, (under it's own steam I might add), and with a certain amount of damage in the process. Lessons learnt, the day after brought much more positive news with an invitation to be included in the list of artists chosen by Visual – A & B to represent the South West. A better day indeed.

This morning however was a sheer delight. Initially my thoughts around this project centred on women with young children and their experience of night. By chance however, when I discussed the research with an recently retired friend, she told me how night had taken on a completely new form for her. Now that she no longer had a set time to get up for, or a work filled day ahead, she could chose to enjoy the night, to get up as and when she wanted, to walk outside and absorb the night sky for a moment. And if need be, she could fill her days with sleep.

This led me to want to explore further how our experience of night could shift and change as the years past. And today I sat down with a good friend in her nineties, a video camera and a few basic questions. I set the camera, sat back and I gave her space. And she filled it. She filled my silence with vague and fleeting memories, sharp hurts, sweet thoughts. With hardly any intervention from me, her expression changed from laughter to far away thoughts, to deep troubles and back again. Some things no one in her ninety years had heard before. It truly was a privilege.

My next session will be with a much younger woman, a woman with many sleepless nights ahead.

September seemed to fragment into a myriad of shattered and interrupted pieces of time. Family life, broken down cars and washing machines pushed in on all sides. Somehow I managed to wade through and complete the pieces of work I felt I needed for the coming BCO show at Paintworks in Bristol. Working in the traditional sense with children around in the summer proved impossible and I began to explore this frustration by blending the relentless, repetitive actions of domestic life with the work itself, gathering the discarded baking parchment from endless cake making sessions and sewing them together in snatches of time over the summer into a bed sized quilt. The very making of this brought up many memories of my mother's battle with depression and the solace she found in baking, the passing of time involved in the action and the subsequent need for approval from those who consumed it.

September saw the studio development plodding on and most of my time spent sourcing, purchasing and devouring the instruction manuals of the technical equipment the ACE grant has provided.

I managed to squeeze in a visit to the MA show in Winchester and a meeting with artist Laurence Rushby as a result of this blog, to discuss the project, galleries and networks etc. With the car fixed, the washing machine repaired and the exhibition up, October is looking distinctly clearer on the work front.